I am in Ohio until the end of the week doing a consulting gig for the legislature. A few things have surprised me and a few haven't. The weather has been exactly what I expected when I left sunny and cold Carson City. Gray? - check. Cold? - check. Humid? - check. I had no expectations regarding wind, but it's there, and cold. If wind could be gray, it would be gray, too.On the surprise side, for a large population (7th most populous in the US, according to Not-Dark-Today Wikipedia), the non-automated way they do business kind of surprises me. As a co-worker put it, the process is "paper and people." True that. In my professional capacity, I am here poking and prodding to see what documents they create and to stitch a narrative together describing the process end to end. It's not surprising to me after doing this a few times, how few people in the organization have a comprehensive view of the enterprise workflow. That is probably because of the need to focus on the piece of the puzzle that directly relates to your own existence to keep your head above water. My goal over the next couple of weeks it do document how they can get a bigger bang per technology buck. A short and intense couple of weeks that will hopefully pay off in the longer run with a contract to do some automation. For me, if they decided to incorporate bill drafting in the mix of new tech, I'll likely be involved.I have to say, I am unpleasantly surprised at the ghost town quality of the area around the Capitol at night and on weekends. I'm shocked, shocked! at the dearth of Starbucks and the hours the one that I did find keeps - close at 3? seriously? Also, there are only two restaurants I've found within easy walking distance of my hotel that are even open past 4 pm, and neither is open weekends. Good if you are on a diet, I suppose.I'm looking forward to blitzing this bad boy this week and jetting home.

The code for the bill drafting and other legal aspects of the Kansas Legislature project I have been working on for the last 3 years (design and implementation) went into code-freeze/change control last week. This is A Good Thing. This means the client can no longer decide to change the color of a button, or the look of a dialog without going through their own change control process. Or, at least that is the theoretical upswing of the deal. What this also means is that I have personally - and solely - designed and coded the legislative drafting process for 4% of the legislatures in the United States. Woo! Go me! I have now done all the design and implementation code for Nevada and Kansas to create bill drafts and amendments.What made it a more interesting and challenging process is that the word processor of choice was different for both states. Nevada was using MS Word 95 when I started the process there. I "completed" it when they were using Word 2003. I did that project as an employee, so the time constraints were not so particular.In Kansas, the word processor of choice was OpenOffice.org's Writer. Of course, being a different word processor, all the tricks I had learned for Word were no longer effective. Incorporating critical processes from keyboard control to linking to a database for information extraction was significantly different working from Writer than it was working from Word. Each had both benefits and caveats, and at this point, I'd be hard pressed to really go out on a limb defending the use of one over the other. From the coding perspective, they both had elements that were easy to work with and abysmal patches that no amount of coding would make smooth.

What would be interesting would be to find a private business enterprise that could benefit from the kind of granular control I can exercise over a word processor. Offhand, I can see benefits to any industry that requires a rigorous and auditable trail of changes in a document: pharma, biotech, legal (obviously), environmental... Coupling my coding base within a document (the innerds), with SVN-type control over a document repository (the outerds) and the result is a far more robust and cost-effective alternative to legacy document control systems.